Posts filed under "blogging"
Gummisig - One of the best looking blog/websites I’ve seen in a good long time. It’s the combination of the colours, gridlines, and big bad bold type that does it for me.
It’s been nearly 4 1/2 years since comments were officially not part of this site. Back then it was because I couldn’t actually host them on my own site, until of course I moved to WordPress and during the blogging revolution of the early naughties. So what’s changed? Twitter and Facebook. Both of which have brought the internet to the world that hid themselves from it, but they’ve practically killed the blogosphere, or at least how it used to operate.
The funny thing is turning them off was on the cards for a while now. I’ve noticed this downturn for about a year now (probably a few months before I even moved to Habari as my blogging engine of choice).
Does it upset me? I guess it’s a different kind of change. While sometimes I like twitter, there’s too much noise for me on there. Also the fact that everyone only speaks in soundbytes does annoy me. I can’t read people’s thoughts about things because they’re limited and effectively people’s voices on the internet are silenced.
In the meantime I’ll be here writing more than 140 characters and hopefully sharing some good links from around the net. If you want to comment on something, drop me an email or you know…send me reply on twitter (maybe I’ll even integrate that twitter reply thing that Michael is attempting at the moment).
OokahBlog - Pascale’s blog, who’s in my art class (which sadly ends tomorrow evening). So much work seems to go into any one post, but some how it’s a pretty engaging scroll. In a day and age where I can’t be bothered typing out more than a couple of lines, she’s creating montages and cartoons for her posts.
FAIL Blog - Easily one of my favourite websites at the moment. The humour just appeals to me on such a base level, and the word FAIL is just the perfect way to describe most of this stuff.
New stopdesign - I love it when classics get a bit of a reboot. Simple yet elegant design.
TweetBacks - Great little plugin for WordPress (that will hopefully be making it’s way over to Habari) that bring Tweetbacks. Think of them as trackbacks only made of tweets.
Owen touched up on something about the length of blog posts. As I read his 3 paragraphs I think he’s definitely correct about the length of post that I enjoy to read. It’s on very rare occasions that I will actually properly read a long indepth blog post, unless of course it’s about a topic I thoroughly enjoy, but truthfully that’s the exception rather than the norm.
Our attention is spread across copious amounts of information, that we process on a regular basis. Information overload isn’t a new thing; limiting yourself to 3 paragraphs for a blog post to get your point across seems to me like an incredibly succinct way to communicate in a more fulfilling manner than the 140 character limit on twitter.
Self editing is a difficult thing, especially when posts are cheap. Beginning, middle and end. Three paragraphs. Communicate your thoughts clearly.
The problem is that 2008 lacked focus for these areas, so it’s time to provide them with a slight bit of structure. I doubt I’ll be able to meet these deadlines, although I might try and attempt to do something about it, the harsh reality is that life will no doubt get in the way; however it’s better to have some structure than none at all.
Compile my Japan photos into a book. I’ve been meaning to do this for over a year. I can’t imagine this taking much of my time, except now that I’ve said that it’s bound to take a great deal of time.
This blasted thing has been waiting to be finished for months. In order to do anything I need to get some discipline. Therefore once a day for 1 hour (be it early in the morning or late at night), I will write for 1 hour. No internet breaks. Coffee break is at the beginning. Nothing but writing.
This is the working title for a little book that myself and Stathi will be working on this year. It’s a very fringe project but I think it could be extremely good fun as we’ve been talking about this for years.
This is something that I hope to get into, although probably the toughest thing to do really, as I’ve not drawn anything properly for nearly a year. Hopefully I won’t suck too much at the beginning to discourage me. The creative process for me is something that is sorely lacking in my life right now. While I don’t want to put something like a number of sketches/drawings per month or per week, I do hope that I surpass last year’s tally, which came to a grand total of zero.
Continued development of the ‘Kode goes without saying. The building blocks for version 8 have been established. I don’t intend to change anything in this design, except enhance it. Add more pages and consolidate the sheer amount of images and work I’ve created these past 6 years. It’s a tall order, but again not really in a rush, as I’ve got loads of other things to keep me occupied. However it’s important to make sure that i don’t let the work here eat into other projects time. Therefore the amount of time I’m allowed to tinker with the site, will again be limited to 1 hour maximum a day. This includes blogging/tweeting time.
5 years ago today, I sat in my room and decided to start blogging, and what an amazing 5 years it’s been - here’s to many more years of online presence.
Simple takes time - Jason Santa Maria on design times. I loved the Mark Twain quote, which I’d never heard before, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” So true, as I’ve been struggling the last couple of months to come to a final design for the ‘Kode. As you can probably tell, it’s still not finished.
Where the hell did a year go? The general consensus I’ve established from people close to me and others not so close to me is that this year has been a bit of a mixed bag in terms of whether I would consider it a classic year or one to put to bed and try and forget as soon as humanly possible.
2008 started on a bit of a high professionally. I was coming off my largest project (and probably my favourite project) but the future looked equally fun and challenging. What I considered a complete dream team of engineers started work on a pretty prestigious project in early January. Unfortunately the project didn’t continue. As they say when one door closes another opens. I had my fair share of these this year. One lead me to Dubai, another lead me to Abu Dhabi, others kept me in London.
Ultimately however my absolute biggest achievement was finally getting chartered (which funnily enough had a lot to do with that project at the start of the year). The whole process took me around 8 months to get done and another 2 months to get a certificate from the Engineering Council. So a tip to all your prospective chartered engineers out there, it takes the better part of at least half a year to get this stuff sorted out.
Inbetween all of this I was able to actually continue teaching (and learning from) the younger generation of engineer working up through the ranks, which is something I’ve always enjoyed, especially with those that I can see the changes happen.
The year can only be described as the year of the 1hour drama, or more accurately, it is the year I discovered HBO and everything was right with the world. For the first time in a really long while, I can probably count the number of movies I was genuinely excited about watching in the Cinema. Obviously the ‘Dark Knight’, ‘Wall-E’ and ‘Iron Man’ come high on this list, but in addition you had a Lebanese movie ‘Caramel’ and the excellent ‘Persepolis’. I found ‘Juno’ incredibly well put together and enjoyed it immensely. In terms of anime, there really wasn’t much new going on for me to get excited about. And of course my surprise movie of the year, SuperBad. It should be just that, super shit, but it ended up being extremely good fun to watch. The only anime movie I watched this year was ‘Origin’, but that movie doesn’t come close to ‘Paprika’ from last year.
However what I wasn’t ready for was this attack of truly inspired 1hour dramas from HBO. To kick it all off I started watching ‘The Wire’ The problem with starting on ths series is that everything else doesn’t come close to it’s perfection, it’s character development and it’s overall 5 year story. I could go on and on about the Wire but it would take too long. Shortly after that I followed it with ‘The Sopranos’. Now this was a series that I had started watching when it first came out, but the Greek television networks fucked it up and I lost interest. Finished this series as well and while most got annoyed by the ending, i thought it was masterful.
Following on from ‘The Sopranos’ was ‘Entourage’ and ‘Oz’. I’d never seen any of these series before, and they all blew me completely away.
The writer’s strike did one thing, and that’s give me the chance to actually discover previous gems from HBO. In my search to fill the void that Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Prison Break, Heroes had left I discovered the best television series ever made.
Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, only a couple of weeks to go before the start of the new series, and that is something I’m seriously looking forward to for the start of 2009…thankfully not a moment too soon, because I think I’ve run out of good HBO series to watch.
This year saw me quit basketball. This was a tough decision to make and I actually went back in September only to remember the reason why I quit in the first place. It’s about the people now not only the sport. I have to make a great deal of effort to play (compared to Greece or Uni) and the problem is I can’t bring myself to keep going in week after week for a sloppy game with stupid egos and arguments. Maybe (like a Phoenix) I’ll grab some games this year, but I’m not very hopeful.
I was meant to go down to Lebanon for my cousin’s wedding. However due to complications with the groom’s health the timing never came about and I didn’t end up going, which is a shame. However in a weird way I was able to see several of my cousins that i hadn’t seen in years (some bordering on 10 years). I also lost a grandfather figure in my life and my grandmother suffered from a stroke. Thankfully I didn’t have too many health issues, except my ongoing saga with my teeth, which I should be sorting out in the new year when I get my wisdom teeth taken out.
Without a doubt this has been the worst year for the ‘Kode. For some reason I couldn’t get around sorting out a design for the bloody place and that had a serious effect on the place in general. I had a huge amount of work done on Habari in the opening months of this year, and then I moved on to other things as I continued work on the ‘script’ (more on that in a while). I don’t intend to increase my exposure on the net, but rather i intend to consolidate all my efforts for the past 5 years. I want to make sure
Artwork - Sadly this was probably the one area of my life that really took a serious hit this year. I don’t actually know if I actually got around to drawing anything significant in 2008. A couple of sketches here and there, but nothing of any significance - easily the most disappointing aspect of the year for me. Here’s hoping 2009 can be completely different.
There is a threshold. For me to write anything, I really need to disassociate myself completely from my daily life for me to create. My brain just cannot handle the onslaught of information. I need to time. This year I had the opportunity to do this in Greece a couple of times, however the first script is not done yet but at least some decent progress has been made from the year before and the general building blocks are apparent.
So was it a classic year? From a creative, productive pov, no it wasn’t. This was the year that I burnt out, or at least felt like I was close to burning out. I think I achieved some goals professionally that I’ve been working towards for the past 6 years, which I feel great about, and getting citizenship will change my life completely.
I view 2009 as a year for regrouping and a year for consolidating my thoughts, efforts and creativity into one goal, and I view it as a year for focus.
2008 Weblog Awards Nominations - Go nominate your favourite blogs across 48 categories. I will probably talk a bit more about this later on this weekend.
Broken Kode has finally reached the 1000 posts milestone. It’s taken nearly 5 years to get to this stage (I’ll be celebrating 5 years of the ‘Kode in January) and honestly there have been several times when I’ve considered shutting the blog down and just keeping a few images and a brief note on here, but I just could never do it, it was like shutting down a part of me. One thousand posts, some good, some bad, some controversial, some stupid, some clever, some offensive, some thoughtful, but one thing I’ve always tried to be is honest.
As always thanks for both reading and providing your comments on the site.
Clearly I’ve gotten back into blogging again, October 2008 was a bit of a record in that I posted on this site 52 times. What’s even more amusing is that I actually wrote another 4 posts which are in various draft stages. I would expect more of the same to be honest, as I have begun using the site as my bookmark tool of choice. I’m surprised I didn’t think about doing this in the past and actually felt the need to use a delicious or a magnolia.
This added renewal of interest in blogging even made me get Mint 2 (I’ve been using Mint 1 since it was released and haven’t bothered updating). I love Mint because it really gives me a much clearer view of what’s going on that any of the other plethora of statistics programmes out there. Definitely highly recommended if you’re interested in knowing what’s going on with your site.
Hope everyone has a fantastic November.
Or so Paul Boutin will lead you to believe from the latest issue of Wired. In what is clearly blog-bait, Paul does raise some interesting points although I don’t think his thoughts past the fact that blogging has had it’s heyday as we got to know them these last few years are all that poignant to be honest.
He is right that blogging isn’t as prevalent now as it was 4 years ago, but then again, very few things on the internet has got that much of a shelf life. He sites Technorati as a source, to which I say, who the fuck searches Technorati anymore? I mean seriously? I’ve not visited Technorati in like over a year probably, that site died a slow a mostly deserved death years ago (we can talk about the fall of Technorati, but honestly I don’t give a shit).
Which then leads me to his thoughts on what we should do. Go and tweet apparently; write stuff on Facebook and show my photos on Flickr. I think he’s missing the point here. I do all of that (except Flickr, can’t get into that site to be honest); the thing is all of my other outlets are connected to my blog. I post something here, it’s shown on Twitter. My posts show up as notes in Facebook. All of these services have their reasons to exist and provide me with a specific service, but they could never replace my blog.
Many have sited Twitter as the blog assassin. I don’t necessarily agree. It serves an excellent purpose, it really does. The thing is though that Twitter is filled with bollocks, but that’s what it’s meant to be. Intermingled within that bollocks are some pretty cool things for sure and he is right in that the vibrant feel of mirrors blogging four years ago, but its not the only method of expression, it’s but one method.
Is blogging as relevant as it was 4 years ago? No it’s not. Things have changed considerably, the blog isn’t new and fresh, because now it’s an established institution of the internet landscape. If you have a website then you have a blog. Some web magazines are now seen as blogs (like Treehugger), but blogs are the personal sites run by one man or woman, not a collection of writers churning out 30 posts a day.
From my perspective, I have changed the way I use my blog. I’ve given up on services like Magnolia and Delicious. My blog is now my method of actually storing my bookmarks. I have words that I use to ‘tag’ the links and they’re easier to find and manage, this has actually prompted me to writing more (it’s been months and months since I’ve posted this many times in such a short period of time, consistently) but I’m finding that I am enjoying this more than ever.
In a perverse kind of way I am glad that the spotlight is off. It means that I can concentrate on all my thoughts and that eventually the people that comment on my site are either the ones that have been reading for a while and therefore have meaningful contributions or people that have found something useful in their search for other kinds of information.
Blogging was never about being the best and most popular voice on the internet, it’s about freedom of expression to the masses in a way that was never before possible. Saying that blogging is dead is like saying that the written word is dead; if you think like that then I have honestly nothing to say to you.
There is definitely something to be said about a slow burning design. At least from where I’m sitting. I started redesigning the ‘Kode last week but the deal I made with myself was that I would limit myself to doing one small thing every day. One element of the design. Be it the typography, or some colour changes or implementing how the asides look. Nothing drastic, just small increments.
The honest reason for this approach is that my life doesn’t allow me the luxury to come in every single night and just hack away and try and sort the code out test it make sure it’s all pucker both locally and online before I unleash it in one big fell swoop. I’ll average 3 nights a week (usually less) when I’m actually at home at a reasonable time and I guess in part I was also suffering from a bit of design fatigue.
Trying to get to that final result seemed pretty daunting at first. Soo many pages that I want to sort out, so many elements that need to be designed for and implemented that when I’ve tried in the past year to deal with them, I just get overwhelmed and often they just live in an electronic graveyard on my computer.
So my tip for all you hobbiest blog designers that do have a bit of redesign fatigue, I would definitely recommend this approach of breaking the pie into smaller slices. Don’t get too upset if things are not there. Start on a solid foundation (I started from my favourite coding base from a previous design) and add to the design in a slow but controlled and consistent fashion. It might not get there as fast, but you’ll definitely enjoy the process more, at least I can claim that I am enjoying this tweaking a lot more than I’ve ever enjoyed sorting out my site.
Maybe it’s because you’ll have moved the design forward, maybe it’s because there’s something fresh to look at every day, maybe it’s both.
Interesting 9rules case study. My favourite part is ‘And as good bloggers do, they blogged on why they left 9rules.’
I was thinking about this today and basically, blogging involves removing the additional thoughts that are in your head that take up valuable space. Things that you should think about but not necessarily keep in your brain knocking about. That way it leaves you with more time to do other things, like in my case watch ‘The Wire’ (best police series EVER created) and read a few books (got a couple of reviews for books you really should read) and most importantly for my sanity, create things. That’s when I’m most happy, when I’m creating stuff.
The issue with me is that that part of my brain has been laying dormant as I began thinking and doing a bunch of other things that seriously didn’t really add to my being,…overall…in hindsight and all that. Part of the problem I guess is that I’m not angry enough at stuff, so it’s time to start getting angry again and flex that muscle again. It’s time to start creating again, it’s time to start blogging again, none of this 7 posts a month bullshit.
To the internet. So last week we were offline at casa Khaled. Yes, that’s right, no net access whatsoever. At first I’ve got to admit that I was REALLY angry. Not at anyone but at the situation itself. I mean seriously, my computer felt like it was neutered. I felt completely cut off from the world and all because as it turns out one of the cables coming into the house decided to collapse on itself. Maybe because it finally decided to give up the good fight because of the cold weather? Maybe it was because the workers outside moved it a fraction and it was to frail to deal with it, either way I was cut off.
This has happened before to be honest, however this one I was a bit more composed with the whole thing. I was actually able to deal with a few things that I’ve been meaning to deal with for a while; like do a bit of writing, do a little bit of drawing and generally do a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. One thing I did miss was this site. I realised that I need this place for venting, something which i’ve been doing a lot less of in recent times. One of the main reasons I continued to blog was because I liked the cathartic process associated with brain dumping, because after all that ALL I’m doing here. Sometimes I rattled a few cages, sometimes I make a couple of people smile, so I think I’ve found that spark that I need to really start making the words on this site start coming alive. So as of tomorrow, you can expect a lot more ‘Kode action coming your way, daily even.
It’s also time I kicked WordPress like a bad habit. Seriously, this shit takes FOREVER to log in. Once you’re in it’s kind of OK, but honestly SLOW as a fat man in water. Some things in 2.5 are nice, but alas I’m thinking too damn little, too damn late, I guess I will write something about it at some point.